


Profiles

by Sotano



Series: Krakoa is for two very specific mutants [7]
Category: Marvel (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: House of X/Powers of X, M/M, inspired by Kevin Wada House of M art and Kieron Gillen's super cool WicDiv issue that did this, magazine profiles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 15:48:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28994730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sotano/pseuds/Sotano
Summary: The Professor knows the value of a bit of good publicity, and Krakoans have been catapulted overnight to international intrigue. Fashion, art, lifestyle, and news magazines all want a piece, and the X-Men oblige.Fictional magazine profiles of the X-Men, in the first year of Krakoa's founding.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Jean Grey/Logan (X-Men)/Scott Summers
Series: Krakoa is for two very specific mutants [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1819501
Comments: 16
Kudos: 21





	1. Pax Krakoa--The Atlantic on Magneto

Don't worry, reader, I don't know how we got this interview, either. You send a request. Everyone's been sending requests. Every other journalist I know has confirmed that they've sent some form of request, some testing of the waters. Almost cursory, at this point, and then a little email with a Krakoan seal we've been assured is the House of M's appears, and the entire office goes into a meltdown.

I think now might be a good time to declare, I am not a mutant. And to reiterate, I don't know how the hell we swung this.

Four weeks and two cancellations later, we've still somehow got this interview; and I'm still the one to do it, so my editor flies me out to Tel Aviv. There's a loose itinerary, we're to meet in a café in the city's very concentrated mutant town, and then I've been promised a peek behind the gates. Only to Transit, mind, humans aren't allowed on Krakoa without a very willing invitation from someone close. Transit is the space between the gates and Krakoa: picture Grand Central Station but weird. Of course, in my excitement, I get ahead of myself. First I have to meet Magneto.

I'm not going to be so naïve as to pretend you, reader, don't know who Magneto is, but he said something which stuck out in my time with him about how humans are shockingly forgetful in the long run and it made me think. We all know the Magneto of now, of five years ago, of ten. Even, those of us who have probably been doing this for too long, of twenty years ago. But Magneto is old, and nobody even really knows _how_ old. Do we know the Magneto of forty years ago? Fifty? Do we hold them in our heads as the same person we see now?

The outfit change, I am beginning to think, is more tactical than symbolic. Yes, the change from magenta to all-white constitutes the metaphorical middle finger of the Krakoan amnesty. He's _right there_ , dressed in the universal color of innocence, totally untouchable by the law. I get it, we all get it. But more insidiously, I think he's made it very difficult to connect all the different eras of his life into one holistic picture.

And again, I get ahead of myself. Honestly, the first thing I thought when I saw him was that this interview was a mistake. Magneto arrives late, as is his prerogative, in white suit pants and a white polo, with a white jacket tucked between his arm and his hip. His hands are in his pockets, and he pulls them out to shift back the wooden chair, and I catch my first and last glimpse of metal on his person in the form of a resplendent silver Rolex. In his hands, it's a weapon.

I haven't even looked at his face yet, reader, and I will admit to being very afraid. Eventually, I did have to look up. His expression is ponderous, but certainly not of me. He barely notices my presence, and this is when I decided that the interview was probably not worth the ulcer I was definitely going to develop.

He scans the café like he's looking for threats, and then I remember that my hotel room had been bugged six ways to Sunday by-- _someone_ , FBI, CIA, SHIELD (I fought with my editor to include that information, thanks)--and I realized that is exactly what he was doing.

"Apologies for the somewhat cliched tardiness," he says, as his gaze finally finds me.

I introduce myself, tell him we do indeed expect a certain degree of this sort of thing from our celebrity interviews, and he laughs. There's a sort of requisite ability to laugh like a manic egomaniac among the caped supervillain crowd, and this isn't that. A short bark of laughter that sets my nerves on end. I might have jolted in my seat, which he probably also found amusing.  
"Celebrity," he says, rolling the word around. "I must say, out of all the labels I've been given by humans, very few have been accurate. Certainly not this one."

That seems as good a place to start as any, so I drink my (third, he was late) coffee, and ask the obvious.

"And which labels do you think are closer to the truth?"

That wins a head tilt, a sort of conspiratorial _you-know-which-ones_ look, and he flags down a waiter for a coffee. I don't know if the waiter didn't know who he was, but that seems unlikely. I'd say I was one of perhaps three or four humans in the joint. Mutants must by now recognize Magneto, even sans the metal helmet. They all seem quite... comfortable, and I realize that for _them_ Magneto is a politician, a sort of national grandfather-figure at most. _Harmless_.

"I'm partial to supervillain, but terrorist always served me well. A sort of conversation-ender," Magneto adds, and no one so much as turned their heads at the word being bandied around. Mutants nowadays, especially this close to a gate, exude a sort of carefree confidence. I don't know if that's racist to say, so take it for what it is: a very uninformed observation.

I'm old enough to have covered Genosha, but not old enough to remember Asteroid M. Maybe that's why I was picked for this interview. This isn't like Genosha. People lived normal lives, and were happier and unburdened in the sense that they were out of the human gaze, but this is a different beast entirely and I don't know how or why. It strikes me as the difference between being insulated and being immune.

"You'd prefer to be thought of as a terrorist?"

"I prefer not to be thought of at all, when it comes to humans."

"Uh huh," I say, scribbling notes on my pad. I'm also recording, and I have the sudden thought that my recording device definitely has metal in it. "Which is why you wore a bright purple cape for fifty years. In the interest of not garnering attention."

"Attention can be a useful tool," Magneto counters, and the waiter arrives with a coffee and some kind of pastry. "I did what I had to do, back then, to get us here."

So the cape was a bit of prestidigitation? I don't know if I buy that, but I move on. I want paragraphs, and he seems determined to give me sentences, but I've dealt with interviewees like that before.

"And where is here, exactly?"

"I'll let Xavier speak for me on that issue. You heard, presumably, his message?"

We all did. I wrote it down in a haze of activity afterwards, analyzed every word, every sentence. I've come to think of it as something between a threat, a theoretical manifesto, a declaration of independence and a fever dream. Some ungodly blend of Black Pantherist (and I mean that in the American context, not the Wakandan) ideology and demands and some frankly very frightening ideas about mutants as the true inheritors of the earth.

"There are a lot of people who heard your words in that message. Are you hinting that you ghostwrote for it?"

He finds this amusing, or as amusing as he seems capable of finding me. "The truth is much more concerning, of course. No. Xavier has always been the more radical of the two of us, in a sense."

"And Krakoa lives up to this radicalism? You've got what you wanted?"

Magneto shrugs easily at that, eyes wandering again either in distraction or because he can see something in this space I can't.

"I do actually need the occasional verbal answer," I say, hoping that a bit of light prodding would produce something. "And, preferably, more than two sentences."

His face now affects a very ill-fitting approximation of an apologetic wince. I get the sense this man hasn't apologized for much in his life. He squares one leg, resting his ankle over his knee. His socks are also white.

"Sorry, I'm doing this as a favor. I tend to value my privacy."

Great. The word every journalist loves to hear. Privacy. I'd like to interject here, again, that this interview somehow happened. And this has never happened before, at least, as far as human media goes. Who knows, with the stuff written in Krakoan? We understood immediately that this was a one-time-thing. One of the Krakoan outreaches, in the wake of their first few months. Someone on the island figures, probably correctly, that culture magazines and fashion shows and the invariable draw of superhero gossip will smooth the way towards people thinking of Krakoa as just another fun oddity. It's got the stamp, frankly, of the Charles Xavier from simpler times. What are the X-Men if not brand ambassadors for mutation? The drugs probably help too. Sorry, _pharmaceuticals_. I'm on them myself.

"So, Professor Xavier speaks for you, and he makes you come here to speak for yourself."

I say it as another of my little prods. I don't know where the courage comes from, but that's really what you do as a journalist. You prod, and see what spills out. In this case, still, not enough. Not enough of a button to press, because Magneto gives me a what-are-you-going-to-do handwave. As if I'm sympathetic to his dilemma, now that I'm privy to it.

"Are there any topics you would like to talk about? I mean personally."

At this point I'd settle for a favorite color, but Magneto seems to almost take the question seriously.

A few weeks ago my colleague, a novelist, took me aside. "You know this is going to be _the_ Magneto interview, right? People are going to _cite_ this stuff. This is going to be Frost/Nixon but with superpowers."  
I waved her off with a joke, but some small part of me agreed. The undertaking of interviewing a man like Magneto is important, just for the sake of posterity. At this point, though, I'm thinking that was hubris.

"I think that's supposed to be your job, to figure out," Magneto says, thoughtful. "But I'll give you a hint: ask me about the food here."

My first cursory glance had dismissed the pastry on a little white plate next to his coffee. To me, it looks flaky, something between a croissant and baklava. Not out of place, but not exactly known, per se. I'd assumed it was an Israeli thing, and now I think perhaps that's what he wants to talk about. Israel? I suppose someone like Magneto probably has very interesting thoughts on the matter, even if it's not what I was hoping to get from this interview. Even if it'll really piss my editor off.

"I don't recognize it. Besides the coffee," I say, gesturing. "I know what that is. But what are you eating?"

Magneto makes a sound, I can't quite recreate it, and I've listened to the recording quite a few times, as you can imagine. The speech-to-text function our magazine pays through the nose for refuses to touch the word. Krakoan. He shows me more closely, takes another bite.

Now, that is interesting. I'd done a fair bit of research and I don't think Krakoan _cuisine_ has come up once. Fashion, sure, and even music a little now. But they have their own _food?_ Since when?

"What does Krakoan culture mean to you?" I ask, with the vague hope that I understand the hint he's thrown.

"That's the thing, though, isn't it? We're still finding out," Erik said. "Ask me again in a hundred years. In a thousand. How long have humans had, since the earliest signs of human culture? Forty thousand years, give or take. We've had less than one."

"And you plan on living that long?"

He seems to like that. "Well, you know," he says, with a vague wave of the hand. He gestures more than I expected him to. "People tell me I age well."

He does. Magneto, nee Erik Lehnsherr (we _think_ ), doesn't look his age until he's put under a certain lighting. Even in broad daylight, he looks a bit like an old-fashioned movie star. Marlon Brando, if he'd aged better. Or maybe Bela Lugosi minus the heroin, some cross between the two. That thought reminds me again that I'm sat across from someone who has killed a _lot_ of people.

"You said mutants have had less than a year to form a culture, and I assume you mean that mutants haven't lived in isolation for very long, or rather in direct contact with each other." Magneto makes a half-nod, like this is an all right understanding of his point. "What about Genosha?"

(I wish I could tell you something flashed on his face. Some remorse, or regret, or something humanizing, although I am sure he'd hate my choice in vocabulary here. No, he was expecting the question. It wasn't on the surprisingly short list of banned topics of conversation.)

"Genosha was not free the way Krakoa is free. I had hoped, at the time, that we could grow. You did not let us. Now, we've quite wisely our growing quietly, in the background, and we're off to a running start."

"You mean Krakoa started out with something humans want; from a negotiational standpoint."

"I don't think that's controversial to say. I was on Genosha when the bombs dropped. Humans didn't think they were particularly risking anything when they either aided in Genosha's destruction or allowed it to occur. Now, you risk your mother's health, your children's happiness. _Your hatred won't overcome your self-interest_. One of Charles' less saccharine quotes, to be sure. Of course, I know that it does, sometimes. Humans are shortsighted, along with their poor memories. You don't know what's good for you, and you people know as well as I do how good it feels to _hate_."

This, by the by, is the monologuing supervillain I'd been expecting. This is what I'd _wanted_. So why am I shrinking back into my seat? He says it with an offhand tone, sipping his coffee, checking his nails, watching the cafe and the city. But he looks directly at me when he says _you don't know what's good for you_ , and I must say, in this moment, I find that I agree.

"Is that what motivated your more violent, um, _phases_? The ones that won you that terrorist label? Do you hate humanity?"

He barks another laugh at this. I can see his canines. It's got no humor in it. "No. Fear and grief, it's always fear and grief," he says, drawing a lazy circle in the air. "Cyclical, just like that. You ascribe me more control than I ever had. To be sure, I have hated humans, hell, I've _killed_ humans, though not as many as you probably think, and I'm certainly damned for that sin. It's especially bad in the lows, but hatred isn't a starting point. It's a byproduct, isn't it? 'I hate you _because_ you have hurt me in the past, and my sorrows need dulling'... 'because I am _afraid_ you'll do it again'. It's a survival mechanism. For humans, I imagine it's much the same, except that the hatred of the dominant species; class, group, whatever; for the oppressed is always more pre-emptive, more enjoyable, and more dangerous."

"I'm sorry," I say, and adjust myself in my seat. "This is getting a little abstract for me. I don't think I'm qualified to touch on the psychological underpinnings of hatred. But I would like to hear your thoughts on death. There are people who will look at me, for doing this interview, and know I sat down with their son's killer."

"If their son was a racist," Magneto said. "I don't kill as many innocents as you are imagining. I have hurt a lot of people whose job it was to kill me, and killed relatively few. I have killed, however, more Nazis, more slavers, and more truly dangerous bigots than I can count. In terms of innocents, I have _gotten_ innocents killed, and more to my misery and misfortune, they have been mutants."

I think I've noticed a pathway with him. You ask a broad question first, you let him pontificate, and you latch onto any specific he gives you. When I asked him about the difference between Krakoa and Genosha, he couldn't help letting slip that he thinks about hatred. He also let slip that he refers to Professor Xavier as _Charles_ , but I suppose they've known each other for a long time. Still, why pretend he uses _Xavier?_.

Magneto gets up and I settle the bill, and by I, of course I mean my _editor_. Interestingly, Magneto has no qualms about letting me pay, despite being a founding member of one of the richest nations in the world. He doesn't even offer, and I get the sense that for him it's important that as a human in this space I pay my way. Almost like apologizing for my incursion.

Only then does he get up and start walking at a leisurely pace, hands back in his pockets, suit jacket tucked into an arm. So, broad and then narrow. Easy.

"What do you think of this place?"

"Earth?"

Too broad. Well, I'd had the idea earlier, might as well give it a shot: "Israel."

"A fascinating mix of history, culture, religion. I've spent some time here." Magneto equivocates, and then throws me for a loop. My pattern isn't that far off. "There are, of course, elements of this place I feel a kinship to, and other elements I find abhorrent. When mutants find religions for ourselves, I hope we weill do better. When we find divisions amongst ourselves, I know we will not be like this. We have your poor example to thank, if nothing else."

"When did you spend time here?"

"After the war. And that's all I'll say about that subject," he says. It's hard to read Magneto, he seems so calm, I have to remind myself to take his warnings very seriously.

"All right. Religion, then, and kinship. Do you consider yourself religious?"

"I had a God," Erik said. "And I suppose I've lost him a couple times. But one can never truly buck the religion they were raised in. It's there, somewhere, quite unshakeable."

"Do you consider yourself Jewish?"

"A more salient question, perhaps, is whether _others_ consider me Jewish. That is, after all, when it begins to get dangerous. But, yes, there's certainly no escaping ethnicity."

Finally we come to the gate, inside the Krakoan equivalent of a consulate office. I am surprised by the bustle of it, and you, reader, return to where I started. Picture Grand Central Station. Now stop picturing it, that's a ridiculous comparison. Picture the Amazon, and the reflecting pool on the National Mall. Now take hallucinogens.

The office space opens up into a rainforest in the middle of this arid Mediterranean climate. There's a waterfall, there are stepping stones across still planes of water, there's _birdsong_ , I think. I might be making that up, it doesn't show up on the recording. There are mutants everywhere, coming and going, just relaxing. Someone whose skin is green shoots Magneto a sympathetic look, seeing me tail him.

"Welcome to our embassy," Magneto says, genial and grandfatherly. "Don't touch anything."

I wasn't going to. "I wasn't going to."

Magneto smiles over his shoulder at me.

"Are the gates always this busy?"

"No," he says. "Mutants seem to like brunch. It's the Krakoan rush hour, ironically enough."

The gate is in front of us now. I've seen a couple but they're worth describing. Blue, glowing, with red orbs growing sporadically around the periphery, rooted in gnarled knots of, well, Krakoa. I really want to walk through, I think a lot of humans see something we can't have and want it, want to master it, and now I'm worried Magneto has radicalized me.

"And Krakoa knows I'm crossing?"

"Krakoa knows everyone who attempts a crossing, yes. Don't worry, you're cleared, so to speak."

"How does that work?"

"Someone has to fill out the paperwork, or someone has to want you to come with them very, very dearly."

"I assume you filled out some paperwork?" I ask, trying to inject some levity, staring at the gate.

"No," Magneto said. "I've got a principle about not inviting humans to paradise. Xavier did the paperwork, so you're technically his guest."

It's always nice to feel welcome. Magneto gestures at the gate, a little semi-ironic be-my-guest, but he does actually want me to go first. I step through, and we're in the air above a gorgeous landscape. Magneto steps in behind me, and we stand on a platform which leads down to rolling green hills and great mountains in the distance. It looks like...

"New Zealand?" I ask cautiously.

"Better than flying, isn't it?" Magneto asks, surveying outwards with a satisfied nod. We pass through another gate and we're in some liminal space, more of the tripped-out architecture fused seamlessly with Krakoan flora. Another gate and we're underwater, in some walkway. I've lost all sense of direction.

Look, I don't have superpowers. I take my shitty car to work in the morning. This is all a bit showboat-y, but in the moment I don't think that. I think: our planet is incredible. I think: why don't humans create things like this for common use? Why did mutants come along and do this for themselves, free of cost, without even debating it?

I have definitely been radicalized by Magneto. I think, though he refuses to confirm or deny, that I have been on the moon.

"Last chance," Magneto said, and we walk out of a gate only to be back in the Krakoan consulate office. _Only_ , I think, as if this weren't one of the most incredible spaces I'd been in until I passed through the gates. "Any more questions?"

My mind is so blank it isn't funny. "Favorite music?"

"Jazz. I know, I'm one of those. Cut me a break, I'm quite old."

"All right. Favorite OG X-Man?"

"Scott."

"You probably should have hesitated there, perhaps a second longer, darling," says Charles Xavier, walking through the gate in long strides, adjusting his suit.

When I say Magneto's mood brightens, it's not exactly what I mean. This whole interview he's been what I think _he_ thinks is polite. Intimidating, but cordial, and even occasionally something approaching amused, or warm, or... I don't know. I had thought comfortable. But now I realize my interview was more or less meaningless, because his entire countenance shifts, and I can see that _this_ is Magneto in a comfortable state. There's an upward tilt to his eyebrows when he grins.

"Charles," Magneto says, dropping the _Xavier_ again. "You're early."

"No, I'm not," Charles says, fond, still walking straight up to Magneto. He kisses Magneto on the mouth and now my biggest concern is that my mind is absolutely going to get wiped. "You're late."

Magneto laughs, and it's genuinely like I don't exist for a second, just long enough for me to start thinking I should maybe just... exit quietly, with my scoop of the century, but that probably tips off the telepath, who turns to me, looking me up and down. Well, I assume. I can't see his eyes.

Charles Xavier is in a black suit, with a black tie, and a grey shirt. I know for a fact he's off to meet with the African Union, because I know he's got a speech today. Halfway across the world. It didn't really click with me that he could be anywhere near us, but of course, _gates_. He's wearing a Cerebro helmet which covers his eyes in an X of some material he can presumably see through. I don't know. I can't see his eyes.

His benevolent smile, though, I can make out. "I trust everything went well?"

"Swimmingly," Magneto replies, demur. It's actually almost a purr, and it's like he's daring me to disagree. I don't. He shifts on his suit jacket, pulling it over one arm and then the other.

"I wasn't asking you, Erik," the Professor says, with a chastising tilt of the head. How I can tell it's chastising, I'll never know. Maybe telepathy.

"It was--illuminating," I think I manage.

"Good. Give my best to your editor," Xavier says, and shakes my hand, clasping it briefly with his other. "I'm afraid that's that. Erik, if you've got no other matters to attend to?"

Magneto nods curtly, almost militaristically, and falls in line behind Xavier.

"It was lovely to meet you," the Professor adds, and it's like being complimented by your kindergarten teacher. They leave out of the gate, and I swear Magneto winks at me, and then I'm being ushered out of the Krakoan consulate, and that's that, as the Professor put it.

Magneto, also known as Erik Lehnsherr, also known as _Erik_. I could have asked, I should have. How long they've been together, that sort of thing. But I didn't, and now I know _that_ was probably why they picked me for this interview. Looking back, I think about what my colleague said. _The_ Magneto interview. I'm worried I painted too kind a picture. Too star-struck, too benign. Magneto is a stone-cold killer. And maybe it's true that we have occasionally rushed to believe he's committed atrocities he didn't do, but I can't believe innocents don't count among the victims. Still, he did it for a cause, for a people, and the dangers he was so afraid of were very real.

I don't think he bears it lightly. I know that's very little consolation, but I'm prepared to warily vouch that Magneto is what he appeared to me to be: an old man, tired from years of struggle, who has finally found some modicum of peace.

For myself, I'm rooting for this new Pax Krakoa. I like Magneto much better when he's happy.


	2. Rebirth--Jean Grey for Vogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cred to Kevin Wada for his earth shatteringly good looking X-Men

  
_Cover Girl_  
Jean wears Carnation jeans with a custom-made belt, Dior pumps, and a Balenciaga crème tee. Hair, nails and makeup are self-styled, with the assistance of telekinesis.

Jean Grey was the girl-next-door superhero when I was a little girl. She was polite, and put together, and even my bigoted mother thought she was a good role model. Something about her exuded a calm, mom-friend vibe even through the mask and the spandex. Marvel Girl! She was! She was an utter marvel, we loved her.

And then, of course, came the Phoenix. Jean Grey went supernova, up in a blaze of glory, only to be reborn as a global threat. It felt a little on-the-nose, like a real-life _Carrie_ ; and we all felt like we had something dark and dangerous in us. The X-Men resolved that threat, and then a bunch of stuff that the public has very little understanding of. A cloning, another death (and this one lasted a little longer), a time displacement. Young Jean was superheroing a few years ago, and I liked her just as much then as I did when I was a child. Still, _the_ Jean Grey; the grown woman who for many of us was the anchor of the X-Men's appeal; had been out of the public eye for a while when she exploded back onto the scene some four years ago, demanding mutants be recognized as a nation state and defeating Cassandra Nova's terrifying plot, some sort of hate-as-technological-virus, to turn us all into the racist reactionaries we might be, deep down. Another on-the-nose one, and Jean Grey now has a bit of a rep for portraying the zeitgeist.

It came with a costume change, one of my personal favorites, a blue and red number that looked modern and armored. Maybe she needed the armor, back from the dead again, after so much time. Now, she tends to forego it. In fact, when I see her first I think she could pass for a particularly muscular super _model_. It's uncharacteristically warm in New York, this summer, and she's got a very fitting vacation tan.

She strikes me as fundamentally unpretentious, with a little hello-wave before she's seated, but she's got a very knowing smile. I wonder if it's a side-effect of the telepathy, because I've seen that smile on the famous Xavier debates from the seventies. Or maybe it's a side-effect of being a student of his. Or maybe it's her, and there's no denying that it fits her face. Catlike, pale green eyes and high high cheekbones to frame them.

"Thanks for agreeing to do this, I understand you've got a busy schedule."

She gives me a dismissive wave, leans back. "Well, it's not the whole _seventy three questions_ setup. I can make time for a quick chat."

A chat. This is our September issue, and we've cleared the cover for her. I guess that's just not a very tall task for someone who's saved the world. I've interviewed superheroes before, though, and Jean is more than usually laid back. She mics up like a pro, and we're going to put up some video footage of the interview along with the prestigious centerpiece spot in the magazine this month. It suddenly clicks a little.

"You're sort of used to the interview, by now, I suppose," I test.

Jean shrugs. "When I was a kid, Charles was on the TV all the time. When it got really bad for mutants, it was practically every other night. There were endless debates, endless hostile interviews. I remember how much of a toll it took, especially with him, you know, _closeted_. This? Comparatively? Sorry, but it's pretty unintimidating."

Her smile is apologetic. She'd actually make a great interviewer, I think. "Probably also helps to have superpowers," she adds, offhand.

"I've actually always wanted to know: what's it like for a woman? Telepathy, that is."

Now there's a sympathetic cringe, wrinkling her nose.

"Whatever you're imagining, it's worse. God, it was awful, when it first came in. Even as a little girl, I remember hearing the most horrific thoughts. It's harder to block out the loud ones, you know? And the loud ones directed at _you_... for _get_ it. Charles taught me to raise some walls, and honestly, it's a bit like profiling. Telepaths know _not all men_ is a bit of a lie, I guess, is what I'm saying."

"I thought the official line is that mutant powers are a gift?"

Her eyes widen, she's been misunderstood. "Oh, they are. Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade it for the world. There are people in my life whose heads I'd _live_ in, if there wasn't so much work to be done. Telepathy is a tough one to manage, in that you have to always be thinking about who you are in relation to the other things in your head, but the idea of being connected to others--it means a lot to me."

"What's family life like on Krakoa?"

"It's--liberating," she says, pursing her lips. I get the sense that this is too simple a way of putting it, that she's not happy with the wording, and sure enough, she expands. "I think a lot of the strain on relationships, at least in my life, comes from fear that you'll lose someone, or fear that you've only got one chance, and you have to get it _right_ , somehow. Personally, I take a pretty hands-off approach with the kids, since they're shockingly capable teenagers, and I remember what I was doing at their age, and I feel like a massive hypocrite if I tell them not to go off getting themselves into danger. But I'm so much less afraid, now. They're not facing what I faced. And they've got a safety net that extends past just Scott and I. Logan--Wolverine, that is--pitches in too, where he can, and he and Nate have always gotten along, even when Nate was an adult. Adult-Nate and _I_ managed, but he and Wolverine understood each other."

Jean's son is from the future, and is actually technically the son of her clone. Her daughter is from an alternate timeline. Her husband, Cyclops, has famously had a longstanding romantic connection to Emma Frost, semi-supervillain, and I don't know that this romantic connection has necessarily ended, exactly. I can't even _begin_ to think how Wolverine enters into the equation, but the picture that is formed is less family and more constellation. It's like the anti-Fantastic Four. People have taken to calling them the first family of mutantdom, and we don't even exactly know where the boundaries are.

"You can see how, to the human gaze, that's a very... _interesting_ family."

Jean grows a bit cold at the question, creates a bit of space. There's a subtle drawing up of her posture. She looks into the middle distance when she answers, too.  
"The human gaze. The male gaze. I used to have to worry about what I looked like, from the outside. Make sure I'm not too scary, not too _weird_. Now I'm in a position where I don't have to be afraid that if we're too alienating we'll put ourselves in danger; I'm more or less done playing respectability politics."

It was a poorly phrased question, she doesn't say.

"And," she continues, musing but now directing her gaze back at me, "I don't think many mutants have what humans would describe as a 'normal' family situation. To be honest, I haven't met too many _humans_ with it, either. The nuclear family is a bit of a myth, isn't it? The best we can hope for is a loving one. The shape is irrelevant."

It's a fair point. I certainly didn't have a fifties war poster style _American Family_. I wonder if anyone ever has. "Do you consider the X-Men your family?"

Jean's much more delighted by this question.

"Of course! Of course. Even the ones I didn't marry," she says, with a youthfully crooked smile. "Most of the X-Men have a surrogate father in Charles, but surrogate siblings for many of us are even more important. It's a pretty big, multi-generational family, and we've all got our closer relatives and our more distant ones, but that's the great thing about surrogate families: you choose for yourself, and you get out of it what you need. In fact, I wouldn't at all say that our cohort, the, you know, _original_ X-Men are by any means the closest, familially speaking. Some of these young kids, they really had nobody in a way I never did, and it means a lot that we get to see them happy and thriving on Krakoa now."

She's got an interesting approach to her relationships, based in that idea of getting what you need. She reiterates it in a few different ways over the time I spend with her. Her children are hers because they, right now, need a mom. Need someone in their corner. In turn, she needs people around her, to ground her powers, to rely on. The X-Men step up. It's a very communitarian outlook.

"If they need to escape, they can escape," she says of Cable and Rachel Summers. "They have friends on Krakoa, they have Krakoa itself. Equally, if I need backup, there are people I can draw from. It's a good setup, I wish more people had it."

"Backup? Are you still fighting battles?"

"I can't really answer that," Jean said. "But backup in all senses of the word."

When she was younger, I remembered that Cyclops used to call the shots. "Have you been taking a more active leadership role? I don't know if this is weird to point to, but young Jean seemed to be leading the time displaced X-Men."

Jean laughs. "So you're a _fan_."

I am, I so am. "When I was little," I equivocate. "And of course it's my job to prep for these things."

"Of course," Jean says, with the full force of that knowing smile. "Yes, I guess I am. It comes with being a _big gun_. And Charles can always use help, there's always a lot to do. I think my role is shifting, now, back to something more familiar. For a while I was _the_ contingency, and it was a sort of emergency-a-week scramble, but now we've got a deeper bench, so to speak, and I'm called on more to straighten things out, morally. Telepaths keep people honest, I think that's true for good or for bad."

Big gun, indeed. If we understand it right, Jean is one of very few Omega telepaths.

"It's not a power you've always had, though, isn't that true? When you were young you couldn't lift a car."

"Everyone grows," Jean says. "I just had a weirder path. Mutants will kind of know what I'm talking about: it's not a linear progression."

It feels a bit like a handle. "To those of us watching, when you first became acquainted with the Phoenix, it felt like you'd been held back before. Is that true, to an extent?"

"Yes and no," Jean said. "The truth is it was complicated, and it was a long time ago, and none of us knew what we were doing. Not like we do these days. We were in the _dark_ , I mean, none of us had ever heard of mutants before we became one. I held myself back, and looking back I can recognize that not all of the coping mechanisms Charles tried to give me were that healthy, but I mean, what did he know? What did any of us? You could spend a hundred lifetimes researching telepathy and still not understand how it works for someone _else_."

It's a very deferent answer, and I think that sums up her relationship to their erstwhile Professor: an almost professional deference, tempered with a warm fondness. After all this time, that's a pretty remarkable achievement.

I know about some of the social _faux pas_ that can happen when you interview a mutant. Everyone remembers the iconic Storm walkout. I shouldn't ask, but...

"And in terms of ideology? You mentioned earlier that your job on the island is a moral one. You've always had a sort of moral role, haven't you?"

"Yeah, I mean, like it or not back in the day we were little mutant _exemplars_. Again, respectability politics. See, we're not so scary after all! Look how we help this little old lady cross the street! Look how cute we look in our spandex, just like the Avengers. It didn't work, or, it didn't work the way Charles might have hoped, but I'm glad we were there as an example to the mutant kids. We didn't convince many of the anti-mutant types, though."

"You're not giving yourself enough credit," I interject. In my personal experience, the X-Men certainly did seem to make mutation less scary.

Jean laughs, though, tilting her head back. "Oh, you're sweet, but," Jean says, "I am. I know exactly how little we really changed about people's minds."

Oh, right. Telepathy.

"It's fine, I'm not hung up about it the way Charles is. And that's what you really want to ask, right? How does my ideology _differ_. It's weird, having Charles and Erik seen as these two discrete categories, and you fit into one or the other. Or two ends of a spectrum, and everyone has to get ranked along it. Kind of nonsensical. People get lost in the weeds. It's not that I don't _understand_ radical mutant theory, or mutant excellence, I was there when it was being _written_. I just know that, especially in the business of a nation-state, we run the risk of doing bad things for good reasons, and I'm strong, and I can make sure that doesn't happen. It's easier for me to identify with _X-Man_ , rather than Charles' ideology, whatever that means."

Jean is a shrewd player, positionally. She understood, better I think than most child stars, the image she had to fit back in the day. And she's layered everything after that in a way that makes it look simple. She's talkative, and reflexively open, and personable, and yet I can't seem to find an identity that fits her until she hands me one: _X-Man_. Not former X-Man, not Phoenix, not mutant icon or Omega telepath, or Marvel Girl. Somehow it fits her concept of motherhood, of family, her place on Krakoa, her role in mutant society, her appearance from the human world.

"And what would you say to the detractors that would call the term X-Man sexist?"

Jean laughs again. "It is! It so is. It's such a shame. Well, it would be more of a shame if it weren't always a bit tongue-in-cheek. I mean, it was our little in-joke when we were kids. We came up with a different backstory for the journalists every time. The X is for X-tra power, I think Bobby came up with that one, it had us in stitches. What else? X-Men like G-Men. Oh, X for Xylophone, X for X-gene, we looked up weird ones in the big dictionary in Charles' study. Xylocarp, oh, I thought Charles was going to _kill_ Warren when he answered that the X stands for _Xenophile_ ," she says, and laughs at the memory.

I find myself laughing along, and I resolve myself to go hunting for any footage of the young, unestablished X-Men after the interview. The problem is that unlike the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, the media world took a while to warm to the X-Men, which is probably what the kids exploited in their little game here. I can definitely picture the young X-Men getting the 'and what's the X stand for?' question over and over for a year or two, with mounting hostility from the journalists involved. Jean seems uninterested in dwelling on this side of the story, totally un-bitter and nostalgic in her reminiscing.

"God, we made _merciless_ fun, and now I can't even remember which was the real one. So, funny enough, back then I had no real attachment to the name, and it was just another stupidity that it was _men_. Now, it's become a thing, you know? A symbol of mutant solidarity. So we're stuck with it. Ironically, our strongest X-Men are always women. It bothers Emma a lot."

"Emma?"

"Oh, Frost."

I want to ask. I want to ask so badly. I must be thinking it very loudly, because Jean rolls her eyes.

"I have a great relationship with Emma," she says. "Almost as good as Scott's relationship with Logan."

Now, I don't have time to unpack that. "Non-nuclear family, indeed."

"Exactly," Jean says. "Welcome to the future, ain't it _grand_?"

The night before our interview, Jean and Scott were photographed in New York. They tend to vacation away from humans, but sometimes, Jean says, you can't beat nostalgia.

"We used to fight villains in this city, you know? It's nice to stroll around and buy expensive things and only have to worry about paparazzi."

They're also photographed in a bar in mutant town, which has become famous for its drag burlesques. Jean waves it away as supporting the _arts_ , but agrees that it's pretty funny their announcer dons a Charles Xavier style Cerebro helmet. In the bar, though, photographers catch Wolverine, and it's what makes the news.

"I'm sorry I have to ask," I say, but she shakes her head as if it's no concern. "But what do you identify as, sexually?"

"I don't think we've got the words for it, yet. I mean mutant sexuality is a totally unexplored academic subject, one ill-advised Doop course at the Academy notwithstanding. But if you're asking about my relationships, I'm thinking on a case-by-case basis at the moment, and my cases do include multiple genders. I promise it's not as strange as I'm making it sound. To be honest, to me, it makes perfect sense. I don't feel like I need to choose. I do what I think is right."

"And Wolverine and Scott get along," I add.

"And Wolverine and Scott get along," she agrees, with another charmingly lopsided smile.

It makes sense to me, as well. Jean Grey has always been a role model, always creating space for others to follow. In twenty years, I'm sure we're all going to look back on this interview as quaint, maybe even a little naïve, and I'm sure Krakoans look back on Jean's constellation of relationships as ahead-of-its time. Jean Grey as always, seems to me to capture that zeitgeist that had all of us at the edges of our seats when we first saw the Phoenix.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vogue's September issue is partially credited for a second wave of migration to Krakoa. The morning the issue drops, Charles Xavier strolls into the House of M with a copy, tosses it down in front of Magneto's breakfast. Magneto looks up in surprise.
> 
> "This is what an interview looks like," Charles says. "Learn."


End file.
